Welcome to Spirituality & Practice

This multifaith and interspiritual website, founded by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, is devoted to resources for spiritual journeys. The site's name reflects a basic understanding: spirituality and practice are the two places where all the world's religions and spiritual paths come together. While respecting the differences among traditions, we celebrate what they share in common.

Take a Tour of Spirituality & Practice

We invite you to take a few minutes to discover how Spirituality & Practice can be a resource for your spiritual journey. This tour explains what's in each section of the site and its unique features. As you read, you may want to click on the tabs in the navigation bar at the top of the page to display the links for each section.

Here's where we highlight our latest content plus some special features. For those who enjoy a daily dose of wisdom, we offer several ways to begin your day: Spiritual Practice of the Day, Spiritual Reading of the Day, Today's Quote, and Today's Teacher. Sign up for our e-newsletter to get regular updates on what's happening in your inbox.

The site is organized around "The Alphabet of Spiritual Literacy," 37 essential practices of the spiritual life. On most pages of the site, you'll see we have related the content to a "Main Practice" and "Other Practices" Click on one of those links or in the list in the navigation bar, and read a definition of the practice and some of the reasons it might be a good one for you. Follow links to pages devoted to a rich array of resources on that practice: books, films, and arts illustrating it, quotes, prayers, spiritual practices, personal explorations, and more. Not sure which one to begin with? We give you plenty of ideas on how to choose a practice.

The Practices section also includes many articles about spiritual practices for everyday life and contemporary issues. The "Naming the Days" calendar suggests ways to celebrate special days with practices — everything from household rituals to DVD viewing to community service projects.

The "Spiritual Practices Toolkit" is an unprecedented compilation of links to articles, reviews, and instructions for more than 260 ways people practice their spirituality. You will find both classic and informal tools to help with almost any area of inner growth and inspired action you can imagine.

To get specific practice instructions, you can also search our "Spiritual Practices Database." Over 1000 practices have been coded by tradition, keyword, and type (Community Practice, Devotional Practice, Everyday Life Practice, Inner Work Practice, Justice/Activism Practice, and others.)

Tell us about your experience of SpiritualityandPractice.com by signing our Guest Book.

Discover how you can benefit from our popular spiritual growth and self-improvement programs led by renowned spiritual teachers. "Current courses" include access to a private online Practice Circle where participants talk about their responses to the lessons and their experiences with the practices. All the previously offered courses -- more than 150 of them -- are available on-demand so you can set your own start date and frequency. The e-course fees are affordable, and the programs designed with computer ease in mind for people of all ages.

Those seeking small group opportunities for spiritual formation can organize Custom E-Courses and private Practice Groups

This section of the website continues our long history of finding spiritual meaning in today's films — from Hollywood blockbusters to special interest documentaries. We only do positive reviews, so you don't waste your time reading about films we don't recommend.

See reviews of the latest movie releases and search our database of more than 5,500 reviews. Make plans to see some of our choices for the Most Spiritually Literate Films of the last 20 years. Read interviews with directors and see galleries of images from spiritual films. Explore collections of films by themes, such as movies about the Afterlife, Dystopias, and Dogs.

Knowing that many of our visitors catch up on films when they are available on DVD or through streaming services, we have separate listings for DVDs.

The Values & Visions Circles area shows how to use films for personal storytelling, soul-making, and spiritual formation. You can download discussion guides to movies plus program ideas for spiritual film circles.

Here you'll find reviews of books, including children's books and audiobooks; most also include an excerpt from the book. Remember, we only do positive reviews, so you know these titles are really recommended for your spiritual journey. Check out our choices of the Best Spiritual Books of the last 19 years. Or search our database of more than 7,500 book reviews and 4,500 excerpts. Go deeper into spiritual books with our lists, articles, interviews, and galleries.

The arts have always supported and enhanced spiritual journeys, so we devote a whole section to them. Included are reviews of new books on art and photography as well as music CDs. To support a "Visio Divina" practice, we have reflections on art and photography. We've also created art galleries and music playlists.

If you encounter any glitches on the site or anything we should know about, please email us.

There are now more than 11,000 spiritual quotations in our Quotes Database, collected mostly from contemporary spiritual books we've read; more will be posted in the months to come. Follow the links listed with each quote back to a review of the book from which it came and to more works by the same author. Check out shorter quotes from Frederic Brussat's posts on Twitter and our memes using spiritual quotes. You are welcome to share them on your own social media accounts.

Inspirational quotes are illustrated in our popular "12s Galleries" on the Alphabet Practices, Birthdays, and Energy Boosters. We've also put together curated collections of quotes, especially for preachers, teachers, and public speakers.

Our blogs present spiritual content in slightly different ways. In some we comment on our personal experiences and practices -- "Body Spirituality," "Spirituality & Civility," and "The Ritual Space." In "Praying the News," we offer prayers, litanies, and spiritual commentaries in response to current events. In the "Spiritual Literacy Blog," we read the book of the world for sacred meaning, pointing you to articles and features we've discovered on the Internet.

We also have two blogs written by guest authors. KidSpirit Youth Voices brings you the vision and prophetic wisdom of 11- to 17-year-olds whose original writing and artwork was first published in KidSpirit, the sole spiritual magazine by and for global youth. Process Musings, written by Patricia Adams Farmer and Jay McDaniel, offers gems of process thought, inspired by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.

Explorations invites you to:

The Living Spiritual Teachers Project contains profiles of more than 130 contemporary teachers we think you should meet on your spiritual journey. We highlight each person's particular contributions and provide links to reviews of books, excerpts, articles, interviews, websites, and more.

The Remembering Spiritual Masters Project profiles teachers who are no longer with us physically but still offer great wisdom through their books, audios, and films.

These projects are works-in-progress so check back often for new additions.

All the content on Spirituality & Practice is "curated" in the sense that it is carefully selected; focuses on recommendations rather than criticism; and is coded by our team for practices, traditions, and keywords. Our topics section gives you examples of some ways content can be curated. For instance, are you interested in gardening? In monasticism? In climate change? In walking as a spiritual practice? We have carefully gathered material on these and more topics for your exploration. You can do the same on other topics of interest to you using our search tools. (More on that below.)

Whenever appropriate, we indicate the religious, spiritual, or other tradition associated with our reviews, articles, and other content. We are now in the process of curating sections on the most common traditions represented on Spirituality & Practice. We've collected links to our content from each tradition, including e-courses, books, films, teachers, practices, quotes, and more. The Editor's Picks identify some of the best entry points for each tradition.

This area is by no means complete. Eventually, we'd like to have pages for all the traditions mentioned in S&P content.

. . . explore The Elder Spirituality Project
This special project maintains that elderhood is a time for intensified spiritual work. It shines a light on elder spirituality from many angles and provides resources for elders and those who work with them.

...explore The Reverence Project
This multi-faceted endeavor identifies resources that illuminate the spiritual path of reverence — one of radical respect, courtesy, civility, manners, awe, and amazement. Learn how you can practice reverence in your everyday life and use it to catalyze changes for the common good.

...explore The Practicing Democracy Project
This collaboration with Fetzer Institute curates resources for different constituencies wanting to support a flourishing democracy. We believe that democracy as a way of life can be strengthened through spiritual practices — those traditionally considered to be "inner work" and those that encourage active community engagement.

Search

Spirituality & Practice has more than 40,000 pages of content, and we want to make it easy for you to find what you need for your own spiritual journey. So we have developed several ways for you to search the site.
The Search button at the upper right corner of each page enables you to search all the pages on the website. The returns are then divided by sections of the site. For example, type "empathy" in the box, and the search returns will be sorted by resources on empathy in the books, films, quotes, practices, teachers, topics, and other sections of the site.

We also have created three search engines for specific groups of content. You can search all our Reviews, all our Quotes, and all our Practices.

Wherever you begin, we hope you'll soon be co-curators of our resources.

About

The final tab on the navigation bar gives you access to more information about us: our Team, Council of Advisers, Partners, and History. You'll find information on how to contact us, including how to submit resources for review. From our Press Room, you can download our press releases and graphics. Our policies are also accessed from there: Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, Discussion Guidelines, and Cancellation and Refunds.

From there, you can also sign our Guest Book and tell the world about your experiences at Spirituality & Practice. Subscribe to our free E-Newsletter and/or E-Courses Announcements email lists for updates on new content and learning opportunities.

Support Us

Finally, if you appreciate what you receive from Spirituality & Practice, please support us! Take one of our e-courses or make a donation to ensure that this wealth of materials continues to benefit you and our entire online community.

We are an ad-free website, a project of a nonprofit organization that does not receive funding from a larger organization. We have received and will continue to seek grants from foundations, but we know that it is our individual donors who really keep Spirituality & Practice going. Every gift, no matter the size, helps us build bridges across religious and spiritual traditions to strengthen the respect, kindness, and mutual understanding that are so needed in our world.